


The Peaceable Kingdom

by kvikindi



Series: The Peaceable Kingdom [1]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: M/M, Moral Philosophy, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2018-11-13 01:56:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11174604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi
Summary: William Manderly visits the plantation, some six years after the events ofUnaccommodated Man.





	The Peaceable Kingdom

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't read [Unaccommodated Man](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11097009/chapters/24758742), the salient thing here is probably that James and Thomas turned the plantation into a kind of commune. Also, Thomas teaches English to the Yamacraw children, and speaks Creek.

On a warm and slightly sticky spring morning near the shores of the Savannah, in the year of Our Lord 1722, a man could be observed walking along the ruts of a wagon-track. He was a tall man, not so young as he had been, clean-shaven and with a scar on one side of his forehead that had the odd shape of a little crescent moon. Some might have said that he was clearly a sailor or an Indian trader, for instead of breeches he wore leather trousers, and a loose cotton shirt with no waistcoat over it. Any citizen of Nassau might have identified him as a pirate by the array of silver pendants and rings he chose to wear, and a few might even have managed to put a name to him, though time runs very fast in Nassau, and the city is forgetful.

The name they might have put to him was not the name he was travelling under, for very few in Nassau had known him as William Manderly. Yet that was the name he gave when he came to the gates of the large plantation not far from the river, and again to the man who led him to a large white house, down a broad sandy path between fields. Men were out in the rows of crops, hoeing and weeding, their faces shaded by wide straw hats, and Manderly looked searchingly at them as he passed. But he did not seem to find what it was that he sought.

He was left in a small, dark, elegantly designed parlour, and assured that someone would be with him in a moment. Though he eyed the sopha with its mint-green embroidered cushions, he did not take a seat, and from his awkward bearing might have been afraid to sit. Instead he clasped his hands behind his back in a somewhat military fashion and peered curiously at various objects in the room: a slightly blackened silver mirror, a small pastoral painting, an ornamental table incongruously stacked with books. A clock chimed somewhere in the house and he straightened, but the changing of the hour did not appear to herald anything.

When at last one of the doors to the room opened, he turned towards it with a look of polite expectation. But the man who entered— a thin, fair-haired man, perhaps in his late forties, with an untidy, greying beard and an absentminded look— seemed startled by Manderly’s presence. His waistcoat was unbuttoned, and several of his fingers had ink stains on them, as though he he’d been puttering about the office and had not expected company.

“Oh, hullo!” the fair-haired man said. “Is someone looking after you?”

Manderly glanced at the door. “I… _think_ so?” he hazarded.

“Don’t mind me, then. I’ve only come to find a bit of paper.”

The fair-haired man crossed the room to a small writing desk and began to rummage around in its drawer. While he did so, the door to the room swung open once again, and two small dark-skinned native children, both dressed in the deerskin garments characteristic of their kind, came pelting in, shrieking at the top of their lungs.

“ _To-mas,”_ one of the children wailed, “ _Ayo chanhomeches! Chamahkes!”_

The other one said in a resentful tone, “ _Chenlakses. Ani manks!”_

The fair-haired man waved a distracted hand at them, not very effectively. “Shh. _Chayayake. Chayayake pumos, hao?_ Please, can you wait in the other room?”

One of the children made a horrible face at the other, who promptly shoved him hard, and they wrestled their way back to the doorway and then through it, whence they had come. Their voices could be quarrelling in the hall for a moment and then gradually died away.

“I’m so sorry,” said the fair-haired man, straightening with a sheaf of paper. He did indeed appear apologetic. “They’re siblings. I’d no idea how much trouble siblings can be. I suppose I’ve got a sibling, but he was very much younger. Second marriage. I never really knew him.” He peered, frowning, around the room, then went to the ornamental table, and began flipping through a book. After several moments during which it seemed he might have forgotten Manderly entirely, the man said abstractedly, “Are you sure I can’t help you?”

“If it’s no trouble,” said Manderly, who was very much ill at ease, perhaps having expected a different sort of atmosphere in this place. “I’m hoping to find a man who is— or maybe was, at one time— a prisoner here.”

“We have no prisoners here,” the fair-haired man said without looking up.

Manderly shifted uneasily. “Perhaps I was misinformed. This would have been in 1716, or thereabouts— a man by the name of Flint.”

Now the man did look up, startled. “James? You’re looking for James?”

Manderly appeared not quite sure whether he were, in fact, looking for _James._ The response had left him with a somewhat perplexed look. (He had never previously heard Flint referred to as _James.)_ Any confusion on the matter was, however, almost immediately resolved by the arrival of the gentleman in question, who announced himself by vigorously slamming open the door, striding into the parlour, and cocking a pistol that was aimed at Manderly’s head.

James Flint was a man of medium-to-small stature, once physically formidable and now somewhat less, his hard-won bulk having given way to a slimmer, softer profile. The dramatic finery that he had worn in his career as a pirate had been replaced with a more sedate set of clothes. Yet the shockingly outsize aura of ferocity that had contributed to his fame in his profession was very much in evidence as he held the pistol steady and advanced towards Manderly, a sword gripped in his other hand.

“ _James_ ,” said the fair-haired man, dropping his book.

“Thomas,” Flint said tightly, “I need you to leave.”

“Don’t be ridiculous; I’m not _leaving_ —“

“We discussed this possibility; we had this discussion; and I told you then what I expected you to do.”

“Yes, and I told _you_ I’d no intention of—“

“I’m not armed,” Manderly said abruptly. He tugged his shirt out of his belt and lifted it above his broad chest, let it drop and rolled his sleeves up above his forearms, then carefully bent and removed each boot— showing that no weapons were hidden anywhere about his body. “I’ve come unarmed. I only want to talk.”

The pistol didn’t falter. “I don’t believe you.”

“What, do you want me to strip naked?”

“It’d be a start,” Flint retorted.

Thomas— for the fair-haired man was Thomas Hamilton, Flint’s lover, who had once nearly been the fourth Earl of Ashbourne, but who now had spent nigh on a decade raising crops in this remote outpost— made a strangled coughing sound. “All right,” he said, holding his hands up in a conciliatory gesture, “perhaps we could all just calm ourselves a trifle.”

“Calm?” Flint said in a voice full of barely suppressed violence. “You want me to be calm? He betrayed his own men and slaughtered them. He betrayed _me._ He tried to murder a young woman while she was chained and helpless. He—“

“James,” Thomas said much more sharply. “ _Stop._ ”

Something seemed to pass between them: a look, a thought, a shared understanding. Flint stopped speaking. “I’m sorry,” he said. Abruptly he lowered the pistol, still gazing at Thomas. “Are you all right? I did ask you to leave.”

“Yes,” Thomas said tersely, apparently unconscious of the frankly astonished look that he was receiving from Manderly, who had never before observed Flint to so check himself. After a moment, Thomas cleared his throat and said in a carefully light-hearted tone, “Can I trust you to stay civil long enough for me to fetch tea? That’s what one does in this sort of situation, isn’t it? I imagine generally before the pistols.”

Flint and Manderly stared at one another and said nothing. At length, Manderly looked at Thomas and said, “Tea would be lovely. Thank you.”

Thomas crossed the room, touched Flint’s shoulder briefly, and then, after a quick hesitation, bent to kiss him on the cheek. He slipped out of the room, shutting the door quietly behind him.

Flint was still holding both weapons, the gleaming blade of the sword in his hand like a long, silent, threatening promise. He said grimly, gesturing with it towards the door, “He’s easily upset.” Then, as though Manderly might not quite have understood his meaning: “So don’t upset him.”

“Seems like you were the one who upset him,” Manderly said. It was difficult to tell whether it was a provocation; his tone was calm, and his voice did not change. “Who is he?”

Flint gave him a flat and unyielding look. “Why are you here, Billy?”

“I’m not using that name at the present,” said William Manderly, who had once been Billy Bones, Flint’s boatswain, and later his opponent. He looked down at his bare feet. Standing there thus unshod on the polished floorboards, he might have been on the deck of the _Walrus_ , or any other of the ships that he had sailed with Flint through their years together. “I meant what I said. I came to talk.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“I suppose I was, after a fashion.” Manderly pointed at the sopha. “Is it all right if I sit?”

“Be my guest.” Flint himself did not move, nor did his gaze grow less fierce.

“I thought you were a prisoner here, you know. That’s what Silver said.”

“I didn’t know that you and Silver were on such terms.”

Manderly’s mouth twisted. “We’re not. I had it from a man of his. No; Silver, he’s run off with his tail between his legs, taking his little wife with him.”

“Don’t talk about her. Don’t you _ever_ talk about her,” Flint snapped. His jaw worked furiously. The sword flinched upwards in his hand.

“I’m sorry,” Manderly said after a short silence. “I meant no disrespect. Or, at least, only towards him. I… regret the way I acted towards her and her people.”

“I think it’s a bit late for that.”

“I know.” Manderly put his head down and clasped his hands over the back of his neck. The curiously awkward gesture bestowed upon him something of the appearance of a child, despite his large, clumsy body and the weariness that had left its marks on his face. “I know it’s too late. But I had a choice; I could either do nothing, or I could do what’s in my power, knowing that what’s in my power will never make it right. And given that choice, I chose the latter. I reckon they can’t both be nothing, can they? It can’t all be nothing? Even if it’s almost nothing. I’ll still take it.”

There was a long pause. Flint looked down at the weapons in his hands. Very slowly and very deliberately, he laid the pistol on a side table. He took a seat on the rose-coloured chaise-longue, balancing his sword across his knees. “What, was this something in the nature of a deathbed conversion?”

Manderly laughed bitterly. “Yeah, something like that. I had a year and a half alone on that fucking island. More than enough time to think.” He looked up, blinking, with the expression of one who does not truly see his surroundings. “The first few months, I was just angry, so fucking angry. Thought about how I’d have my revenge— on you, on Silver, his woman; on that snake of his, Hands. I spent weeks just imagining killing you. How good it would feel. All the ways I could do it. How I’d make it last. Not for me, but for Gates, for Randall, for Muldoon, for everyone who died on account of you. But the funny thing is that when you spend that long being angry, when there’s nothing else for you to do, and I mean _nothing_ else… It’s like a fuel that burns itself away inside you. I woke up one morning, maybe half a year in, and there was no joy in any of it anymore. No pleasure. And I just thought, What the fuck am I doing?”

Flint’s face seemed to have transformed. It had aged in a moment. Previously it had not been the face of an old man; despite the silver in his hair and the worn-in lines round his features, at the edges of his eyes and mouth, he had an oddly youthful appearance. Yet now the years showed. He looked ancient. He said quietly, “I can imagine.”

“Course, then I still had another year to figure out what the fuck I even was without that. I couldn’t even say, looking back, when it had first started. I thought— maybe with the killing; maybe there is something, when you kill a man, that changes you. Scars you. But to go that far, to get rid of that much— there’d be nothing left.”

“Do you regret it?” Flint asked with a clinical curiousity. “The— killing. Killing your first captain.”

Manderly shook his head. “No. I can’t bring myself to. In the end, I guess that’s the only thing that seems to matter. What you can live with… what you can’t.”

“It strikes me as a rather bleak credo to live by.”

Manderly gave a choked-off laugh. “Do you think that makes it more or less persuasive?”

Flint’s response was cut off by Thomas’s return. Thomas had made an attempt to neaten his hair and button his waistcoat, but on close inspection several of the buttons had been skipped. He was carrying a china tea service with an excess of caution. It was clearly a task with which he was not overly familiar, and he struggled to close the door with one foot.

“Sorry,” he said, setting the tea service on a table. “I had to set the children an exercise. And Pakpakochi and Ayo were fighting again. I see the number of weapons has been halved; shall I leave you alone to talk?”

Both men looked rather strangely at him. Perhaps he sensed the sombre atmosphere in the room, or perhaps he saw on Flint’s changed face something of the tone of their discussion, for he began to back away towards the door.

But Flint drew a breath and said, “Billy, this is Thomas Hamilton, my… companion here. Thomas, this is—“

“William Manderly,” Manderly said, rising to take Thomas’s hand. “I knew Mr.— er—“

“McGraw,” Flint supplies, looking faintly embarrassed. “He knows the name Flint.”

“— many years ago, in Nassau.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Manderly,” Thomas said, not betraying any familiarity with the name. He moved to the tea service and began decanting the tea into cups. “Will you be staying in Georgia long?”

Manderly seemed nonplussed by the politeness of the response. He accepted a tea cup balanced on a delicate saucer. It bore a floral pattern and looked very small in his hands. He stared down at it as though not quite sure of its purpose. “I had thought to go to Philadelphia,” he said. “There are men there, religious men, who work against the slave trade.”

“You’re seeking a change in profession, then?” Thomas crossed the room and offered a tea cup to Flint.

Flint accepted the cup mildly and took a sip from it, holding the saucer poised over the sword in his lap. There were many men, not only in Nassau or the Caribbean at large but also along the coast of the colonies, who would have been taken aback by the sight of the most savage murderer in the Americas quite peaceably drinking tea. Manderly’s expression was more complicated. He paused with his own cup partway to his lips and watched Flint as Thomas joined him on the chaise-longue. The two men sat side-by-side, regarding Manderly with very different, though equally curious, looks of expectation.

“Yes,” Manderly said at last. “I mean— I hope to.”

Flint and Thomas turned towards each other in an eerily synchronised motion. Their eyes met. Once more they seemed to communicate via a shared glance. Flint frowned and shook his head; his gaze had darkened. Thomas quirked an eyebrow insistently. The whole conversation took no more than a moment. Then they were turning forwards, again almost as one body, and Thomas said, “You’ll stay the night, of course. We’ve plenty of room.”

Flint said, “I’m sure Billy is eager to be on his way.”

“Nonsense. The whole purpose of this plantation is to provide a shelter for those who must live outside of society. I should think a repentant pirate more than qualifies.” Thomas sipped his tea, as though oblivious to the air of tension.

“I would hate to inconvenience you,” Manderly said, just as Flint said in a low, hard voice, “Repentance can only go so far.”

“Do you think so?” Thomas asked. He sounded rather meditative. “I’ve often wondered— where and why the cutoff is. Can a man only change so much, and no further? Is this some sort of finite human capacity? That is not my experience of change.” His gaze had drifted towards the window, somewhat absent. Abruptly he stood, his tea cup rattling in its saucer. “You must excuse me; I have to see to the children,” he said.

When he had gone, Flint and Manderly eyed one another in silence.

At length, Manderly spoke: “I truly don’t mean to cause any trouble.”

“One night,” Flint said.

* * *

The three men ate an awkward supper in the plantation’s mess hall. It was a noisy building, full of good humour, and many of the men addressed Flint and Thomas by name, conversing about the state of the seed reserves, or asking questions: Had Oglethorpe taken a particular book with him in his move to Savannah? Was he of a mind to lend it back? Had Thomas received a response regarding the cost of a clavichord from the music merchant in New York? What did the Yamacraw say about rising tensions with this new tribe, the Hitchiti? How did Flint suppose the Spanish would respond? Some were clearly curious about the presence of the newcomer, but beyond ensuring he was well-supplied with venison and cornbread, they did not venture to ask him any questions

Midway through the meal, having eaten very little, Thomas stood and quietly withdrew from the room, pausing only to bend and whisper a brief word in Flint’s ear. No one remarked on his exit, and Flint’s level stare across the table challenged Manderly to comment on it.

Manderly did not. Instead, he poked with his wooden spoon at a scoop of peach compote and said, “So— not a prison, then.”

“It used to be,” Flint said. “We had other ideas.”

“We, who? You and Mr. Hamilton?”

If Flint heard the question, he did not answer it. He turned to speak with a large, dark-haired, affable man about the effect of Spanish trade on the price of deerskin, a discussion that veered off into a seemingly well-rehearsed round of complaints about the effectiveness of Savannah’s volunteer militia. The general consensus seemed to be that Oglethorpe— who, as governor of the colony, was in charge of overseeing its military force— could not marshall his way out of a London salon, and that were it not for the Indians, all of Georgia might be Spanish by nightfall.

“Give me three hundred good men,” Flint said, “and a couple of thirty-two-gun frigates, and we could take St. Augustine in less than a month. But will that man heed me?”

The affable man said knowingly, “I imagine there's someone else who would not be best pleased by that kind of talk.”

Flint rolled his eyes, but his mouth curled up fondly— almost, though not quite, a smile. “He enjoys it. He treats it as an opportunity to lecture me about hubris. Says I am too old to go starting wars."

“Aren’t we all,” the other man said, and they laughed.

When Flint turned back towards the table, Manderly was watching him with a considering expression.

“What?” Flint asked, suddenly guarded.

“You’ve changed,” Manderly said. “This place has softened you.”

* * *

Flint and Thomas shared a house on the west side of the plantation, a square, plain, solidly-built three-roomed place. One of these rooms was a sort of center parlour, containing a hearth, a square wooden table, and a number of chairs. The others both contained beds, but the smaller of these rooms was more akin to a library, being home to several shelves of books. It was to this room that Flint escorted Manderly following supper. He lit a candle; pointed at the narrow bed, with its lumpy bolster and its rough red woollen blanket. Then he pointed at the lock on the door. He said, “So you don’t get any ideas.”

“I don’t blame you,” Manderly said. “I’d do the same.”

“No. You would lock me in and burn your own house down to spite me.”

“You still think that?” His face was open, full of inquiry.

Flint blew out a sigh. He leant against the wall. “I don’t know what to think.”

“I was wrong. It occurs to me that I haven’t said that. I was wrong, and I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t make a difference.”

Flint’s face was in shadow. “No. No, it doesn’t,” he said.

“Well,” Manderly said— and then seemed to fail to find anything to follow the word with.

“Well,” Flint repeated.

The silence hung in the room. There was something heavy about it, like a tree branch bowed low to the ground by the weight of ripened fruit. Just as there is a tension in such a branch, so there was a tension to the silence. Flint fidgeted; he was not a man made for stillness. After a while, it was more than he could stand, and he left the room without a word, turning the lock behind him.

Manderly remained seated on the bed, bowing his head and hunching his shoulders. The casual observer might have thought he was at prayer. Indeed, there was nothing to contradict this idea, apart from the fact that, when he at last he roused himself, he did not appear to be at peace. His eyes were troubled as he looked about the room. He touched the bare, wooden, slightly uneven posts of the bed, and the blanket with its coarse carded wool. The candle flame flickered, casting moving shadows on the shelves with their careful lines of slightly worn books.

Voices were audible through the closed door, fragments of conversation, and after a time, the temptation of listening proved too much to resist. Manderly stood and quietly moved closer, till he was standing so near the door that his face was touching the wood.

_“… realise I’m going to need spectacles?”_

_“Thomas.”_

_“I’m getting older.”_

_“I think you have a few good years left.”_

_“I’m only saying; where on earth would one get spectacles in the West Indies?”_

_“I have known it accomplished.”_

_“I won’t countenance inferior spectacles, either. They make the problem worse.”_

_“It was only a suggestion.”_

_“Wouldn’t you be_ more _likely to run across old pirates there?”_

_“He’s hardly old.”_

_“No. I was surprised.”_

_“I’d forgotten that; I’d forgotten how young he was, and— some of the others. That makes it worse, somehow. Harder.”_

_“Because we are born innocent, and must learn to sin?”_

_“I don’t feel energetic enough for_ that _conversation. I’m— worn out.”_

_“Come here.”_

Footsteps across the floor. A sigh. A long caesura.

_“… Sun all the time, and fresh fish, and fruit… we could grow mangoes. Have you ever eaten a mango?”_

_“I love you.”_

_“And rum.”_

_“You drink quite enough.”_

_“I’m going to bed; you can admonish me for my drinking in the morning, and then we can argue for as long as you want about the nature of sin. Are you coming?”_

_“In a moment. I want to finish writing.”_

If the conversation continued after that, it was in the other bedroom, and could not be heard. Manderly stayed pressed against the door for a long time after, as though listening to some noise perceptible only to him, or perhaps listening to footsteps, rustling, crickets chirping outside, the scratch of a quill on paper, the creak of a chair: all the everyday sounds of a settled household. Thomas absently hummed a few phrases of music at one point, and Manderly withdrew from the door. He went and unlaced his boots and lay upon the bed. The night was too warm for him to want a blanket. He stared at the ceiling for a long time, then turned to rest his head against his arm and watched as a few moths flocked around the candle, joined by a long-legged insect he did not recognise.

* * *

Sometime in the middle of the night, Manderly awoke to the sound of a key turning in the lock. He was the sort of man who cannot wake without reaching for a weapon, and he did this now, and seemed startled not to find one available to him. The room was dark, he having put out the candle before sleeping, but the man who opened the door was carrying a candle stub, and the light from it revealed him to be Thomas Hamilton.

“I’m so sorry,” Thomas whispered, when he saw that Manderly was watching. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I couldn’t sleep; I came for a book.”

He was barefoot, dressed only in drawers and a nightshirt, his hair untidy from bed. He padded across to the bookshelves, reaching for a clearly-familiar volume.

“These are _your_ books,” Manderly said in a tone of comprehension. “Your books and not his.”

“More mine than his, perhaps. If only because he gives them to me.”

“He used to a have a woman in Nassau he gave books to.”

Thomas bent his head so that it was hard to read his face, given the long shadows and the low light from the flame. He was hugging the book tightly against his chest with the arm that did not hold the candle, as though he were afraid he might drop it, or that it might escape. “Yes,” he said at length. “That woman was my wife.”

“And now Flint is your wife.”

“He’d probably prefer if you didn’t put it like that.”

“He’d probably prefer if you weren’t in here speaking to me.”

“That too.” But Thomas made no move to go. He simply stood still in the centre of the room, looking rather ghostly with his fair hair and his long white shirt.

“He loves you,” Manderly said. “I didn’t think he was capable of love.”

“Most men are capable of it, I find.”

“Perhaps I mean he was in love with an idea. It seemed like he would sacrifice absolutely anybody to it. And then it seemed that everyone I knew was like that, under the surface, like if you scraped away just a little of their skin, they were all the same. There was no loyalty there. It was all just animals, trying to survive. I used to want to be a good man—” He paused, and seemed unsure how to continue the statement.

“I don’t believe there are good men,” Thomas said quietly. “I believe there are men who do good things. I believe we all have in us a great capacity to do good things. That capacity does not diminish, though we sometimes wish it might.”

“What if that capacity’s not great enough to balance out the things you’ve done before?”

“I don’t think it works like that. I don’t think there is some cosmic balance.”

“I do,” Manderly said. “I can _feel_ it. The weight of it all, wearing me down. It’s killing me. I don’t know how to get out from under it.”

Thomas tilted his head, looking thoughtful. There was an innate softness to him that often made him seem in need of protection, something that offered no violence, and therefore caused him to be labelled kind, gentle, or innocent. And he was kind sometimes; gentle often; but innocence was not a characteristic of his. In this moment, his lack of innocence was plain, and neither kindness nor gentleness formed part of his expression.

“In my experience,” he said, “it’s possible to live with almost anything. What has been done to you; what you have done to others. If what you wish to know is whether you can repair the damage, then the answer is that you cannot. Nothing will undo what has been done. But one can hold oneself to account for the remainder of one’s actions. You can undo the damage you have not yet done. Is that enough? Probably not.” He stirred and moved towards the door. Over his shoulder, he added, “For what it’s worth, most things get easier with time.”

He had reached for the latch when Manderly asked, “What happened to you?”

Thomas didn’t turn. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “It troubles him if he wakes and I’m not there.”

* * *

In the morning, Flint led Manderly to the gates of the plantation. Thomas was nowhere in evidence. It was a bright morning, but heavy with the humid air that promised a smouldering heat to come. Birds were singing in the moss-covered trees, and a group of women were laughing as they carried laundry out to wash. In the distance, the hills looked crisp and blue-and-green-coloured, an idyllic picture of another world.

“Thank you,” Manderly said. “—For letting me stay. For not killing me as soon as you saw me, I suppose.”

“You should thank Thomas, not me,” Flint said.

“Tell him thanks.” Manderly paused and squinted up at the powerful blue of the sky. “I do mean to go to Philadelphia, you know. I meant what I told you.”

“I know. I believe you,” Flint said.

“But you don’t trust me.”

Flint took a long time to answer. “Men are like ships,” he said. “Troubled by winds and currents. They have a tendency to not stay their course. Keeping them to it takes constant labour. It’s not easy.”

“And you think I won’t stay my course.”

“I hope you will.” It seemed an honest answer. There was something serious and rather sad in his eyes. “I wish you the best of luck, Billy.”

They had reached the large wrought-iron gates with their Latin inscription. Once they had formed a barrier between this place and civilization. When a had man crossed it, there was no going back. Now that boundary was more permeable, but still the sense of it remained: the separateness of these quiet colonial acres, and the feeling that what lay beyond was full of uncertainty, even dread.

Flint offered Manderly his hand. Manderly took it, looking a little wary. Then he said, “You’re lucky, you know.”

Flint’s expression didn’t change. “I know,” he said.

* * *

Much later, in the cool blue early twilight, Flint found Thomas at work in the plantation’s vast herb and vegetable garden. The garden had grown in the years since Flint had come to the plantation; vines climbed wooden trellises that stood over his head, and patches of balm and echinacea spilled out of their stone fencing. He leant on the wobbly stick gate, inhaling the scent of so much green stuff. Even after so long away from the sea, he was not much of a farmer; if put to a test, he could not have named most of the plants. But his face, as he watched Thomas pick the slugs off the buckhorn ferns, humming distractedly under his breath, was one of a man who did not mind being so far from his own kingdom.

When Thomas stood at last and wiped the sweat from his brow with one sleeve, he saw that Flint was watching him. “Is everything well?” he asked. “No more pirates arrived out of your murky past, seeking forgiveness?”

“I was not the one who asked him to stay,” Flint said mildly.

“Did you forgive him?”

“I am not the archbishop of pirates. Was that what you wanted?”

Thomas picked his way past the neat rows of sprouting radishes, carrying a straw basket. “I had no particular goal.”

“That is a lie. You were transparently engineering.”

“Was I?” Leaning over the gate, Thomas kissed Flint on his nose, which he promptly wrinkled in an expression of dissatisfaction.

“Don’t try to distract me,” Flint said. “You need a bath.”

“Very probably,” Thomas agreed. “Let me put my tools away, and we can share one.”

“I am sure you think your machinations are subtle.”

“Perhaps I simply find you an unsubtle man.”

In response, Flint gripped a handful of Thomas’s shirt and drew him forward across the gate. Thomas’s eyes went half-closed; he was clearly expecting to be kissed. But Flint did not kiss him. Slowly, he lay his head against Thomas’s shoulder, and slipped a hand beneath the shirt where he had pulled it loose, flattening his palm against the warm skin over Thomas’s ribcage. He did not stay anything; he just stood there with his hand like that, stroking his thumb back and forth over in the smallest of motions.

After a moment, Thomas’s arms came up to circle him. He pressed a kiss into Flint’s hair. “Was it the wrong thing to do?” he whispered. “I so often do the wrong thing.”

Flint shook his head. He sighed, then straightened, withdrawing his hand. “You always do the right thing,” he said. “You forgave Peter.”

Thomas looked down and picked at a stray thread in his shirttail. “It was easy to forgive Peter,” he said, “because I did not yet know the scope of what I had to forgive him for. I was still discovering it after he died. I keep on discovering it. Even if I forgave him now, tomorrow I would find some new… _tendril_ of it. How can I forgive something that isn’t finished happening?”

“That seems an exhausting idea.”

“I don’t know," Thomas said. A small shrug. He was still working the thread loose. "After all, it means that we survived. The more other things there are, the less there is of that thing— so one keeps growing and growing, like a landscape swallowing up a ruined castle, turning it into just another stray stone.”

Flint frowned. “Are you comparing yourself to a ruined castle? I feel obliged to defend you.”

Thomas’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “Oh, I think we are both well on our way to being weary old stones.”

“Speak for yourself. I am in the prime of life, as I will be happy to demonstrate after you come home and bathe. Not before, because there are grass stains on your breeches.” Flint unlatched the gate and, with a flourish, beckoned Thomas through.

“You are a tyrant,” Thomas said. “I’m sure I don’t know why I tolerate you.”

But he slipped his hand into Flint’s as they walked towards the plain little house, twilight turning to full violet dusk, and mourning doves hooting from the eaves of buildings. Far off, bats swooped and dived about the sugarcane, and wind rustled the leaves of the early corn, and all along the forbidding block of the tree line fireflies could be seen like yellow sparks. In the hushed garden, there was a great stillness, as of stagnation, though in dark places under the earth, things continued to grow.


End file.
